The number of adults with diabetes has doubled worldwide over the last three decades to nearly 350 million including a threefold increase in the United States. This number includes about 138 million adults with diabetes in China and India, and another 36 million in the U.S. and Russia.
Diabetes is a long-lasting and disabling condition and can lead to kidney failure, blindness, amputation of limbs, and even death if not treated promptly and correctly. Many public health experts consider the rise in diabetes to be more worrying than the rise in high blood pressure rates and cholesterol levels as there are effective drugs for those two conditions, but there are currently no equally effective drugs for the treatment of diabetes.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a novel and very effective drug regimen for the treatment of Type II diabetes not previously available.
It is a further object of the present invention to treat Type II diabetes with a combination of readily available off-the-shelf drugs so that the treatment is cost effective and easily provided to a large number of patients.
Certain prior art publications have used off-the-shelf drugs in an attempt to provide an effective treatment for diabetes.
For example, United States Patent Application Publication No. 2001/0036917 proposes a treatment for diabetes through use of monosialotetrahexosylganglioside, also known as GM-1 The present invention also uses GM-1 but the clinical approach used with the present invention is entirely different than what is described in the '917 patent publication. Similarly an article by Lee Liang-Ming in the American Journal of Chinese Medicine, 30(4), pp. 601-608, ISSN:0192-415X, mentions the use of Ligustrazine Phosphate (“LP”) for the treatment of diabetes, a second drug used in accordance with the present invention. Again however, this article utilizes an entirely different clinical approach than used with the present invention. Also neither of these two references show or suggest combining GM-1 and LP in the particular manner and with the particular treatment regimen utilized for the treatment of Type II diabetes in accordance with the present invention